This is the most critical technical chapter in the book. The Democrats must run a real, modern, data-driven campaign from the top down. They must make themselves accountable, including and especially the candidate. This is about operations, not ideology.
Democrats commonly miss the fact that, while politics is often emotional, campaigns are empirical. They are driven by data, by facts on the ground, by budgets and programs. They are not simply deus ex Obama miracles. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, any winning campaign is indistinguishable from magic. Obama’s 2008 victory looked like a movement, but it was really a world-class data and targeting operation, optimized digital and television media buys, a highly organized field program, and a tightly disciplined team hunting votes on the Electoral College map.
Charisma, likability, electability, and—for fuck’s sake—policy are fool’s gold if the campaign doesn’t have its shit together.
I’m going to call hard bullshit on the Clinton 2016 campaign because they deserve it. They were lazy, smug, wasteful, insular, arrogant, incompetent, fractured, tone-deaf, sloppy, and worst of all they lost to Donald Fucking Trump. No one was accountable, ever. Hillary Clinton could have taken Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan but didn’t do the work, leaving those prizes wide open for marginal efforts by Trump and his Russian allies to tip the scales.
Do you know the biggest mistake made first by the sixteen other GOP candidates and then by the Democratic Party and the Clinton campaign in 2016? They built teams without real leaders. They patched together the candidate’s friends and brought in people who allegedly had the secret sauce, but at the top of each campaign was a person who was more a manager than a leader.
All national (and statewide) campaigns are filled with factions, alliances, enemies, ass-kissers, and hacks. Some of them are worth their salt. Some of them are just along for the ride. Some of them are going to bust their asses twenty hours a day from the moment they come on board until Election Night.
For the 2020 Democratic nominee, the campaign’s national structure needs to be as light, nimble, and smart as possible. Heavy on politics and press, light on policy and favor hires. It needs to avoid the “hire my guy” problem to which too many operations fall victim. “Hire my guy” is that moment at the end of the primary campaign when, in order to make peace, secure an endorsement, or lock in some core demographic of support, the victor agrees to hire some of the loser’s campaign staff.
For the love of God, just this once, don’t. The nominee needs a disciplined team of people who are honest and direct behind closed doors and who are smart, loyal communicators in front of the cameras and on social media.
Talking shit about doing voter registration is the “my Canadian girlfriend” of politics. Democrats keep talking about it, and keep claiming it’s going to swamp the Florida, Texas, and other state GOP branches in the next election. Or the next. Or the next.
Voter registration is the key. New voter drives in the swing states should already be well under way, and if they’re not, it’s grotesque malpractice. All the issue groups Democrats love so much need to be out hustling registrations as though their political lives depend on it, because—spoiler alert!—they do. Planned Parenthood, Moms Demand, the unions, and the rest need to stop driving for policy concessions and bring real, hard voter-registration drives to the fore of their agenda. That’s value to a campaign.
The Democratic billionaire class should be directed to push resources into registration as well, since the state parties in the places Democrats need to win in 2020 range from merely competent to utter train wrecks.
The election isn’t fought on Election Day. It’s fought for three to six weeks before Election Day as an increasingly meaningful fraction of voters cast early ballots. If Democrats fail to understand this enormous strategic aspect of the 2020 race, it doesn’t matter how November 3, 2020, looks. The GOP professionals around Trump will be banking votes early and often.
Early voting is the not-so-secret weapon the GOP has used in Florida and elsewhere for a generation now. Democrats have started to close the gap, but early and absentee voting require a culture shift for the Democrats, and fast. The old model was warm-body turnout on Election Day, moving meat to market. While that’s still important, early voting not only banks votes but shows you what’s happening on the ground.
Almost every state allows some form of early voting, whether in-person or absentee balloting.7 Some are more restrictive, but early voting is a powerful strategic indicator and barometer; it lets you focus resources, serves as a kind of live tracking poll, and warns you if the people you’re paying to turn out voters are doing their damn jobs. (Often, they aren’t.)
Republicans have aggressively sought to close off early-voting programs that disadvantage them in places like Florida. For once in a generation, the Florida Democratic Party seems to have its shit together; by the spring of 2019, they had a team of attorneys working to ensure protections for early-voting access, Spanish-language ballots, and voting access for ex-felons who regained their right to vote after the passage of Amendment 4 in 2018.8 Democrats complain a lot about voter suppression, for which I can’t blame them when it comes to cases like this. Yes, part of “voter suppression” is the way GOP majorities set the rules (elections, famously, have consequences), but much of that “suppression” can be counteracted with a moderate investment in pipe-hitting election lawyers.
Field operations, even in this digital era, still count. They’re still where the rubber meets the road, and where the winners and losers diverge. Field operations is the place where Barack Obama stole a march on John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012. To be sure, Obama was a compelling speaker, a charismatic liberal leader, and a media darling with a killer targeting operation, but the Obama campaign also out-worked, out-hustled, and out-organized my side. Twice.
Don’t even get me started on the nothingburger of Hillary’s field operations. Even against Trump, who had no field operations, she lost. Democrats need to track all of those people down and put them on an ice floe. Republicans may bleat about Alinskyite progressive organizing principles, but here’s the stark reality: They’re investing in them right now, training and prepping field organizers who will be knocking on doors in 2020.
If the first topic on Tom Perez’s mind every morning after raising money isn’t deploying a fired-up, motivated field army, he’s not doing his job.